Taking Apart Toy Video Cameras

Toy cameras. They're fun to give to kids so they can take pictures without ruining your camera. They're low quality and cheap. But what's powering them? Anything cool? Anything useful? Many of them at least have an LCD screen, but what other treasures are they hiding?

DJ Hard Drive Turn Table Part 3 - Playing Audio

So now the turn table is writing output to the serial connection off of the Arduino. This is very good. But what good is it if we can't play audio with it? That's what this part is all about: translating the signals from the turntable into audio modulations that we can hear. In this case, we're speeding up and slowing down a audio track. Let's get started!

State of the Blog

About one year ago, I started this blog as a place for interesting computer stuff I did so people could learn as I did about new and often undocumented things and how to break them. Even with the very well documented stuff, I still had to figure some implementation details out. I know I had a blast learning and writing about this stuff, but I'd like to address some of the more meta things about this blog in this post. I try to keep it to one meta post a year, and this is it for this year.

DJ Hard Drive Turn Table Part 2

Welcome back to this episode of "Why isn't this working?" This week, we have the DJ Hard Drive Turn Table. When we left off, we weren't getting accurate directional readings from the drive. Needless to say, that kinda sucked. So I took it to an oscilloscope to figure out what was going on with the output of the op amps. It turns out it was a really weird problem.

Virtual Reality Using Your Computer as a Controller

I've been playing around with ThreeJS more and more now and I'm still not getting the hang of it. But I still enjoy using it even though I'm struggling through the darkness. I wanted to do something with its VR capabilities, but I also didn't want to pay an arm and a leg to get a decent VR headset. So I did the next best thing. I broke out my cardboard and played around with it. The results weren't Vive quality for sure, but for $15, it's exceptional what you can do with it. Unfortunately, it's hard to control something like this without a controller like the Vive. So I did something like Oculus did - made the computer the controller - but I did it without wires.

DJ Hard Drive Turn Table Part 1

There are tons of tutorials on how to do this on the internet. The hard drive is an amazing part to do this with because the motor and bearings are so smooth and provide very low resistance of rotation while still being light. It could also turn itself (having a motor and all) and, best of all, it was free because my roommate dropped it and it stopped working. Which is a shame because it was 2.5TB. Regardless, I knew what I wanted to do with it almost immediately.

Quick Computer Teardown

I was moving out of my apartment, but I didn't want to take these two computers I found in the dumpster. At least, not all of them. The big bulky cases were stupid to take with me, so I decided to tear them down and see how compact we could make it while still keeping it reasonably usable. These were two old computers, but I imagine I could do something fun with them at one point.